alt Hacker News- "pretty sure the first generation were pure-analog circuits"
This Wikipedia entry isn't what I had in mind, but it describes an interesting analog mechanism,
- "For guidance systems based solely on star tracking, some sort of recording mechanism, typically a magnetic tape, was pre-recorded with a signal that represented the angle of the star over the period of a day. At launch, the tape was forwarded to the appropriate time.[2] During the flight, the signal on the tape was used to roughly position a telescope so it would point at the expected position of the star. At the telescope's focus was a photocell and some sort of signal-generator, typically a spinning disk known as a chopper. The chopper causes the image of the star to repeatedly appear and disappear on the photocell, producing a signal that was then smoothed to produce an alternating current output. The phase of that signal was compared to the one on the tape to produce a guidance signal.[2]"